The ad, clipped from one of the national Pakistani newspapers today (it apparently ran in all of them), seeks bids for a national censoring firewall: "Each box should be able to handle a block list of up to 50 million URLs (concurrent unidirectional filtering capacity) with processing delay of not more than 1 milliseconds."
Alice spotted this coffee cart from the (above average) London coffee chain Apostrophe, which includes a superfluous apostrophe. It's either ironic or too clever by far.
Piotr Czerski's manifesto, "We, the Web Kids," originally appeared in a Polish daily newspaper, and has been translated to English and pastebinned. I'm suspicious of generational politics in general, but this is a hell of a piece of writing, even in translation.
Writing this, I am aware that I am abusing the pronoun ‘we’, as our ‘we’ is fluctuating, discontinuous, blurred, according to old categories: temporary. When I say ‘we’, it means ‘many of us’ or ‘some of us’. When I say ‘we are’, it means ‘we often are’. I say ‘we’ only so as to be able to talk about us at all.
1.
We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.
Brought up on the Web we think differently. The ability to find information is to us something as basic, as the ability to find a railway station or a post office in an unknown city is to you. When we want to know something - the first symptoms of chickenpox, the reasons behind the sinking of ‘Estonia’, or whether the water bill is not suspiciously high - we take measures with the certainty of a driver in a SatNav-equipped car. We know that we are going to find the information we need in a lot of places, we know how to get to those places, we know how to assess their credibility. We have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the learned information for a new, better one, when it comes along.
To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working, solving everyday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to do it, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it.
Vill4no snapped this great shot of zombie Star Wars cosplayers at Megacon 2012, where there was much awesomeness on display, judging from the rest of the set.
Inside Tibet and elsewhere, ethnic Tibetans are today observing Losar, or Tibetan New Year. Above: Tibetan women pray around Labrang Monastery in Xiahe county, Gansu Province.
He died on the spot. Chinese police officers attempted to take away his body, but were prevented from doing so by the monks of Zamthang Jonang monastery. The monks later cremated him and performed all the necessary rituals and prayers for the deceased. According to eyewitnesses, while setting himself on fire Nangdrol folded his hands in a gesture of peace, calling for the return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Tibet.
Police and military presence are high throughout the region, particularly at monasteries where these tragic acts of self-sacrifice have taken place. By various accounts, as many as 25 Tibetans inside Tibet have self-immolated in protest in the past two years.
The country's Tibetan-populated regions are in a party mood as the Tibetan New Year, or Losar, falls today, striking a stark contrast with the call by the "Tibetan government in exile" to cancel celebrations.
The Losar holiday, which lasts two weeks, is followed by the 53rd anniversary of the Tibetan uprising, which took place on March 10, 1959. It's hard to imagine the climate of military intimidation and surveillance in the region ratcheting up any higher, but the uprising anniversary date typically brings just that.
On an unseasonably warm November night in Manhattan on our way to get ice cream, we stumbled upon what appeared to be a vintage shop, brightly lit display window and all. As we began to walk in, a man sitting out front warned us that we were welcome to explore, but nothing inside was for sale. Our interests piqued, we began to browse through the collections the man out front had built throughout his life. This is a story of a man and his home.
Wondering why your Facebook breastfeeding image was blocked, but not the image of a deep wound your friend posted? Wonder no more. A leaked document reveals the weird, arcane, and extremely detailed guidelines used to determine which images are Facebook-safe.
Facebook bans images of breastfeeding if nipples are exposed – but allows "graphic images" of animals if shown "in the context of food processing or hunting as it occurs in nature". Equally, pictures of bodily fluids – except semen – are allowed as long as no human is included in the picture; but "deep flesh wounds" and "crushed heads, limbs" are OK ("as long as no insides are showing"), as are images of people using marijuana but not those of "drunk or unconscious" people.
Modern cereal box art features beloved characters rendered in a certain overdone pseudo-3D style. The technique: slickly-gradated shadows with intense highlights. When done well, the result offers the vividness and "pop" of computer graphics, without losing the hand-drawn warmth of a traditional 'toon.
Done badly, and it causes goosebumps. Take the Fred Flintstone on this cereal box, for example. Those too-shiny highlights are applied, as if at gunpoint, over a too-realistic stubble texture. Like a corpse dipped in urethane, it has all the gross realism of Untooned Homer.
Bonus creepy! Check out the latest rendering of Smokey Bear, the once-cute mascot of the U.S. Park Service.
Smokey is now highly-enriched nightmare fuel. But it's not those dead eyes, melted reactors deep within the CGI exclusion zone, that will haunt you. It's the neat row of human milk teeth, glistening in the reeking forest stool pit of his mouth.
Know What is a new travel guide for LA and San Francisco (with New York, Chicago, Portland coming soon). It's available on the iPhone, and you can buy additional guides from different people. I contributed a guide for 25 spots around LA, called "Unicorns, Carnivorous Plants & Other Angelenos I've Known and Loved." You can get it as an in-app purchase.
Know What is kinda like the anti-Yelp -- instead of 10,000 angry know-it-alls spitting venom cuz they read the menu wrong, it's all people who know better than anybody what they're talking about. And what they're talking about is their favorite places and local joints in the cities they know best.
And fighting back against the bland-ification of life.
People from groundbreaking websites like boingboing.net, sfgirlbybay.com and vegansaurus.com
Brilliantly creative folks like Weetzie Bat author Francesca Lia Block, OC Weekly editor Gustavo Arellano, and Girls Gone Child blogger Rebecca Woolf
Mission-driven non-profits like the LA Conservancy, SF Heritage and SPUR
Purveyors of rare and vital information like Esotouric, Thinkwalks and LA Bizarro, the best selling guide to LA's absurd underbelly
And they take us to some amazing places – lots of places that (gasp! is it possible?) don't even exist online. We're currently covering LA and San Francisco, with New York, Chicago, Portland, and Seattle coming really soon.
Touch earthquakes with your bare hands in SF … eat Korean BBQ that'll melt your brain off in LA … drink with ghosts at Bukowski's favorite bar … guaranteed make-outs at the Bay's best secret view (*actually guaranteed) … get your mind thoroughly blown by all the awesome nobody even knows about in San Jose (and likewise Orange County. YES -- Orange County).
And it's priced so that you buy what you want, don't pay for what you don't, and the whole time you're supporting all these great people and non-profits that are doing their thing to keep the internet and the world super rad. ($2.99 gets you the app with more to do than you've got time for, and you can keep adding content for less than the cost of an old bag of Jolly Ranchers.)
Daniel Ritthanondh's "Barnacle Ceiling Lamp" is a tribute to the decor in the game Half Life, an altogether ooky bit of ceiling sculpture. Not yet available for sale, but Ritthanondh advises that a limited run will be forthcoming.
Cassetteboy vs. The News: "There's been a shocked response around the world to video footage appearing to show U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urinating on Boris Johnson." [YouTube via Metafilter]
Video Link: "Justin, Bloody Justin, Bloody Bieber," by Hugh Oliver (website).
It is reckoned that he's hotter
Than Harry fucking Potter,
His hairdo like some wagging gold retriever,
Looking lovely, looking cute
In his pater-knity suit,
Our Justin, bloody Justin, bloody Bieber.
Know What is kinda like the anti-Yelp -- instead of 10,000 angry know-it-alls spitting venom cuz they read the menu wrong, it's all people who know better than anybody what they're talking about. And what they're talking about is their favorite places and local joints in the cities they know best.
Daniel Ritthanondh's "Barnacle Ceiling Lamp" is a tribute to the decor in the game Half Life, an altogether ooky bit of ceiling sculpture. Not yet available for sale, but Ritthanondh advises that a limited run will be forthcoming.
